Deeplinks Blog posts about Digital Video

NASA's successful landing on Mars of an SUV-sized nuclear rover from a rocket-skycrane should have marked a high point in collaborative accomplishments between humans and robots. But here on Earth the situation was a bit more tense. That's because, just hours after the celebrated touchdown, Vice Magazine's Motherboard blog broke the news that one of NASA's official clips from the mission had been pulled from YouTube, replaced with a notice from the video site indicating that the "video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds."

EFF Joins Mozilla, Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge and Others in Launching the Internet Defense League

Good news, TV fans! Aereo, a startup that lets viewers watch broadcast TV over the Internet from tiny, personal antennas, can stay up and running - at least for now. Several television networks are trying to sue it out of existence, beginning with a motion asking a federal court to shut it down until a legal decision is reached. It's a typical move, and one that forces many innovative startups into bankruptcy long before any court has ruled on whether their business is legal. Last week, however, Judge Alison Nathan of the federal court in Manhattan denied the motion and made Aereo the first Internet TV business of its kind to live long enough to defend its business model.

Remember over-the-air broadcast television? The kind that you can receive on a variety of devices, without scrambling or monthly fees? For decades, the principle that the public airwaves are just that – public property – has been an obstacle to TV studios’ efforts to control when, where, and how we watch their programs – and at what price-point.But that hasn’t stopped them from trying.The latest target is Aereo, a New York City startup that lets users stream local broadcast TV from a dime-sized antenna on a Brooklyn rooftop to their personal devices.

New Yorkers: Worried about whether you will have a right to watch local TV broadcasts on your Internet devices? Aereo is a company that lets users watch their local channels by renting a dime-sized antenna at Aereo's facility - one per customer. The signal from that antenna gets sent over the Internet to a single user. In effect, the company moves the "rabbit ears" antenna from the top of your TV set to a central facility. Aereo, like the VCR, the DVR, and many other video technologies, simply lets people watch the TV shows they already have a legal right to watch at different places and times, and on different devices. And just like they did with many of those technologies, copyright owners are suing to shut it down.